Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness

Ministerial Communique, Intergovernmental event at the ministerial level of member states of the United Nations on the occasion of the 60th anniversary of the 1951 Convention relating to the Status of Refugees and the 50th anniversary of the 1961 Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness (7-8 December 2011) UN doc. HCR/MINCOMMS/2011/6, 8 December 2011. 

Keywords international law, protection, stateless persons, statelessness, 954 Convention on the Status of Stateless Persons, 96 Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness, nationality laws, human rights law, refugees... 

The necessity of such a convention—and ultimately the underiying cause of statelessness—lay in the fact that at the core of sovereignty was the unfettered discretion to set the terms of membership. In other words, states have traditionally been free to establish their own rules for the acquisition and loss of nationality, in accordance with their own interests and ideology. Where such rules are exclusionary or there is a corrflict between the rales of different states, statelessness may result The function then, of what would become the 1961 Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness, was to agree some restrictions on states freedom in rrationaHty matters. 

The 1961 Convention seeks to prevent statelessness in three basic contexts acquisition of nationality at birth (Articles 1 to 4) loss, deprivation, or renunciation of nationality in later life (Articles 5 to 9) and regulation of nationalily following state succession (Article 10). In each case, the Convention outlines the responsibility of the state(s) concerned by dictating when it must allow the individual to either acquire or retain nationality. The common thread throughout—and what makes it a convention on the reduction of statelessness rather than an instrument for the harmonization of rratiorraBty laws—is that the (p. 294) obligations only go into effect where statelessness would otherwise result. For instance, in Article 1, the convention does not compel states to adhere to the jus soli doctrine, but it does require them to grant nationality to a child bom on their territory if he or she would otherwise be stateless. 

Weis, P. (1962) The United Nations Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness, 1961. International and... 

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